Scanning inkjet printers typically have a relatively small printhead compared to the width of media on which they are used to print on. Printheads are scanned across the width of the media, in one or multiple passes, to print a swath of an image. The media is then advanced a small distance to allow a subsequent swath to be printed. The time taken to generate printed output is therefore highly dependent on the time it takes the printheads to scan across the width of the media.
Page-wide array printers typically have a static wide array of inkjet nozzles configured to provide a print zone of a chosen width. Since the array of nozzles are not scanned across the width of the media, the media may be advanced in a continuous motion. This enables the printing speeds of page-wide array printers to be generally significantly higher than scanning inkjet printers.